A Recent Move, Not an Old Custom

Open communion has not always been the default even in churches that practice it today, and its adoption can sometimes be dated precisely rather than traced to unbroken custom. Community of Christ, the Missouri based church that emerged from the same nineteenth century movement as the Utah based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints but developed independently of it, moved to an open table as part of a broader wave of change inside the church during the final decades of the twentieth century, alongside its 1984 decision to open all offices of the priesthood to women. Both changes followed the same internal logic: a church rethinking who has standing to participate fully in its life is likely to rethink communion discipline in the same period, since the two questions, who may serve and who may receive, both turn on the same underlying claim about what the church's sacraments and offices actually belong to. The change was contested within the church at the time, provoking dissent from members who read the shift as a departure from the tradition they had inherited, and some independent branches formed afterward specifically to continue the older, more restricted practice the main body had left behind.